(1949- ) Japanese writer, translator and former jazz bar proprietor, inspired by such Americana as the stories of Richard Brautigan and the Absurdist SF of Kurt Vonnegut. Murakami's laconic prose is thick with American allusions and quite unlike the insular intricacies of earlier Japanese literature. His rambling, pensive characters, often suppressing emotional trauma through the pursuit of an unlikely McGuffin, are joined in later books by a recurring obsession with Japanese expansionism on the Asian mainland, particularly in World War Two. Many works juxtapose a contemporary world seen in terms of drab farce with a fantastical and ultimately allegorical Parallel World.

The semi-autobiographical Rat Sequence chronicles the 1970s through the eyes of a would-be author, beginning in Kaze no Uta o Kike (June 1979 Gunzō; trans by Alfred Birnbaum as Hear the Wind Sing, 1987; new trans Ed Goossen as Wind2015 dos) with fannish appreciations of the fictional American novelist Derek Heartfield, a suicidal pulp author modelled in equal parts on Robert E Howard and Yukio Mishima. 1973-nen no Pinball (March 1980 Gunzō; 1979; trans Alfred Birnbaum as Pinball 1973, 1985; new trans Ed Goossen 2015 dos) comprises a melancholy quest for a pinball machine believed to hold the ghost of a former lover (see Identity Transfer). Translated in domestic editions for students of English, neither work was released outside East Asia at the author's own insistence until the new translations appeared in 2015. Hence, most foreign readers only encountered the Rat Sequence through its Noma-award winning third instalment, Hitsuji o Meguru Bōken (August 1982 Gunzō; 1982; trans Alfred Birnbaum as A Wild Sheep Chase1989), which augments the earlier paradigm with a Chandleresque quest for a fabricated sheep, mixing Fabulation and nightmare. With Murakami's consent, the translation redacts period details and inserts some 1980s anachronisms, divorcing it from the chronology of the books that originally framed it. The final volume, Dance Dance Dance (1988; trans Alfred Birnbaum 1994) features a dingy flophouse that somehow still inhabits the same space as the plush new hotel that has supplanted it, just as shadows of the past haunt the modern Japanese psyche. (see Magic Realism; Time Paradoxes).

Although little more than a mundane recycling of Murakami's earlier concerns, the phenomenally successful Norway no Mori (1987, trans twice as Norwegian Wood, 1989 Japan and 2000) [see Checklist for details] made him a wealthy man. Fleeing media attention in Japan for two years on the US lecture circuit, he wrote a survey of modern Japanese literature, Wakai Dokushu no tame no Tanpen Shōsetsu Annai ["An Introduction to Young Authors"] (1997). Meanwhile, eager American academics elbowed aside Murakami's earlier, less laurelled translators, not always for the better, leading to several works available in rival editions. Later novels repeat the formulae of idiosyncratic quests and mournful elegies, but with named narrators different from the unidentified "I" who unites the Rat Sequence. Sekai no Owari to Hard-boiled Wonderland (1985; trans Alfred Birnbaum as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World1991; vt The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World1991) presents separate but converging narratives in the style of Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan (1959); the first depicts a Future War for data in a Near-Future Japan that has become definable as a nest of information; the second depicts a fantasy realm where scribes extract dreams from the skulls of unicorns. Such dovetailed trajectories recur in Umibe no Kafka (2002, trans by Philip Gabriel as Kafka on the Shore, 2005) and shades of Philip K Dick can be found in the Alternate World in which the protagonist of 1Q84 ["1984"] (2009; trans by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel 2011) finds herself (see George Orwell; Franz Kafka).

Murakami was also formerly the Japanese translator of Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, F Scott Fitzgerald, and John Irving, among others, until this parallel career was overshadowed by the success of his own fiction. His genre translations include The Polar Express (1985, trans 1987) by Chris Van Allsburg and Catwings (1988, trans 1992) by Ursula K Le Guin. His immense stylistic influence on contemporary Japanese, Chinese and Korean popular culture is discernible in everything from increased sales of Beatles albums, to the intersecting vignettes of Wong Kar-wai's film Chungking Express (1994) and the sentimental Anime of Makoto Shinkai. The quintessence of Murakami is the twice-translated, twice-filmed "Shigatsu Aru no Hareta Asa ni 100 Percent Onna no Ko ni De'au Koto ni Tsuite" (July 1981 Trèfle, coll 1983, trans as "On Meeting My 100% Woman One Fine April Morning", 1991 [see Checklist for details]) a brief encounter that extrapolates a mere glance at a passing stranger into a whole world of what-if.

The Elephant Vanishes (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1993) [coll: trans by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin of the following stories from the above: "The Fall of the Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of the Raging Winds", "The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women", "The Second Bakery Attack", "The Elephant Vanishes" and Family "Affair": hb/Chip Kidd]

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